While I agree that we should all avoid sites that require IE, the simple truth is that many of us can't. There are many critical business apps out there that absolutely require IE, and contacting them requesting Firefox support results in a "no, you need IE for security reasons". You'd think it would be enough to just tell them that they're wrong, and that many of the most secure sites in the world are entirely standards compliant and render just fine in any browser, but you'd be wrong. I personally have one such site, and I have witnessed several others. Many MLS services that are required by any real estate agent wishing to do business in this century, for example, require IE to work properly, and the only choices are to suck it up or do business in a different area with a different system.
Believe it or not, there area lot of things that take priority over ideological opposition to "IE reqired" websites, and sometimes there just isn't any choice.
I agree that it's inappropriate to use in the conext of an unintentional bug, but I can see legitimate uses outside the issue of DRM... for instance, consumer electronics designed to break after about 1 year of regular use (Sony used to do this constantly with the Discman) in order to drive consumers into buying new ones regularly, or Lexmark's (old? haven't used their stuff in ages) practice of selling ink cartridges with very small reservoirs at higher prices in order to subsidize cheap yet very high quality printers.
Point is, "defective by design" describes DRM, but also accurately describes many other shady business practices intended to increase sales through incompatibility and early obsolescence. The fact that it wasn't coined until the advent of DRM doesn't mean we should horde it for that sole use.
Well, I think I found the problem... you live in Denmark. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Denmark or the people that live there; I'm not about bashing Danes. It's just that Google is a US company that focuses on the US first and everywhere else second. You said it yourself, the problem isn't that address searches don't work... it's that they don't work outside the US.
In any case, the core function works just fine. The problem is that Denmark's roads haven't been properly input to their road database. That isn't development's fault, and there's no reason to claim they shouldn't be working on new core functionalities (it's hard to monetize directions, it's easy to monetize business listings; I highly doubt Google isn't going to announce a pay service extending on the new functions... I'm not sure how, I'm not sure when, but I'm sure they will). I hope they fix it, but the sad truth is that your problem isn't going to be at the top of their list because it isn't in their primary market.
Try sending a complaint or something. Maybe they'll put a mook data-entry intern on it.
I don't like Mitt because I have lived under his governorship for the past 6 years.
The man is a snake-oil salesman par none, but that is the beginning and end of what he can do. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to win, and once he does it will be large corporate interests and moving on to his next aspiration all the way.
I don't care what you think of Massachusetts' laws and politics, it is completely inappropriate for the governor of any state to go on cable news networks and overtly lampoon it at every chance, or to virtually abandon the state for 3 years in preparation for a presidential bid. Romney's governorship, for all that he tried to spin it it and save his legacy at the last minute (honest to God, he ran ads during the early days of the gubernatorial election FOR HIMSELF despite the fact that he had already announced his non-candidacy and was supposedly campaigning for his lt. governor), was characterized by incompetence, broken promises, gross media misconduct, and absence.
I admit that I'm unlikely to vote for any Republican candidate (as someone said above, McCain might have been a possibility before he started pandering to the Religious Right; they're poison), because frankly I find the Democrats to be right of my own positions, and the core Republican platform is so far right of me that I can barely understand it. But that said, if there has to be another Republican in the Oval Office, I'd still rather have a half decent one. Romney is the worst candidate out there, and if he gets the Republican nomination it will be nothing short of a tragedy.
Just put him in charge of all the Olympic games or something, he did a great job with the ones in SLC, but other than that, he's an incompetent jackass with a Napoleon complex.
... of running the country into the ground with long-debunked pre-Depression economic policies and hypocritical attempts to turn Conservative Christian values into law.
Anonymous edits aren't the problem: allowing anonymous edits to go through without approval by a named editor (all they would need to do is look quickly and hit an "OK" button or a "Reject" button and it would be enough) is.
I think of it this way, if I don't have a Wikipedia account, and i see a basic grammar/spelling error, I'm not going to take time to open one just to fix it, and I think the community should accept that I would like to help but don't really care to identify myself because doing so might well take longer than simply submitting the edit. If it requires somebody to take vicarious credit by approving the edit, then frankly I won't know the difference, nor do I care, if I did, I'd already have an account.
Then you missed out on a great deal of fun. The best DnD campaigns I've ever played, all the PCs started out as level 2-3, and that only because it's almost impossible to get any experience at all and not hit level two by the second session, and the DM felt it would be better to just get it over with earlier so we could better get into the swing of things without the distraction of leveling.
Personally, I always hate when GMs let the PCs be too powerful. Epic gaming just isn't that fun: I'll take five level three characters struggling through a cave full of kobolds over a level 23 Sorcerer/Monk/Ranger singlehandedly defeating a Dark God with his Vorpal Spatula of Glimmering Destruction +7 any day of the week.
Dell could care less about alternative OSs. In fact, they could care less about primary ones too; the only reason that Dell cares what operating system comes on their machines is because their customers do. Specifically "everyone" (vocal minority aside, they do) wants Windows on both personal and business machines.
The reason that Dell offers blank PCs "intended for Linux" at all has nothing to do with actual customer demand for them: if it did, they wouldn't make them so hard to find on their site. The real reason is that they are a direct threat to Microsoft, and Dell is too big for Microsoft to call their bluff. Essentially, Dell is using "Linux ready" commodity computers as a bargaining chip to get deeper discounts for Windows and Office so that they can get a bigger edge on their competition for the 99% of customers who do, in fact, want them.
If there were serious demand for OSs other than Windows, it would actually hurt Dell, because they would lose one of their biggest advantages. Sure, they could still compete on volume, and they certainly have a great deal of hard capital, but they've sunk a lot of time and money into getting a REALLY juicy Microsoft contract, and if it is suddenly worthless, they're back to squeezing water from stone on hardware.
And only did so after carefully weighing it against the cost of a land invasion to both sides. Further, after seeing what *actually* happened to Hiroshima, the second target was changed at the 11th hour from the metropolis of Nagoya to the small city of Nagasaki. The point was to become akin to a force of nature to the Japanese, so that they could honorably surrender without the need for US troops to slaughter every man woman and child first.
I too find it hard to think of a nuclear attack as an act of compassion, but under the circumstances, it was. Thankfully, there is no major culture remaining which requires overwhelming force on the order of a natural disaster as a prerequisite to surrender.
That said, maybe the media companies should find new ways to make money that do not rely on outdated and obsolete versions of reality. The capital required to move 100,000 copies of Justin Timberlake's new album just isn't what it would have been 50 years ago, and the RIAA needs to not just get over that, but embrace it and find a new profit model. Do I know what that profit model is? No. Is that not my job, but the record industry's? Yes.
As with the analogy, maybe the solution the blacksmiths are looking for is to start producing parts for trains, or to move to a more consumer oriented product line (silverware, puzzles, frying pans, etc.), or to invent ICEs and start building cars (a great piece of turnabout, making the trains obsolete); what the solution ISN'T is to go out every night and wreck the tracks and smash the windows of the railroad company, because it isn't accomplishing anything other than being a nuisance and creating a slight delay of the inevitable.
Actually, creationists by definition DON'T have scientific beliefs. Don't tell that to a creationist. The fact that they have no LEGITIMATE scientific case doesn't mean that they don't have scientific beliefs, it just means that they have very poor ones. I know plenty of actual science, by the way, I just apply the definition the same way I apply the definitions of "poetry", "music", "gender", "intelligence", etc. because I would rather include some things that might not really belong than exclude things which really do but don't meet the criteria based on a definition from our limited perspective and experience.
I admit that I've not been following string theory too closely, has it recently fallen out of favor? Is there some new threshold for acceptable evidence that states we cannot use indirect evidence? Have atoms been discredited because we only have circumstantial evidence that they exist? I don't disagree that global warming has slim to no direct evidence, but I very strongly disagree that this is an important thing to mention. All it means is that we first have to establish certain facts: for example that Earth's temperature is rising (it is, nobody denies this), that this rise clearly coincides with specific human activity (temperatures have gone up at highly accelerated pace since the start of the industrial revolution, evidence gathered from ice cores and glaciers indicates that the current pace is far above any other in the thousands of years of data contained in those ice cores), that no other apparent cause can be given (the Sun hasn't gotten any hotter, aliens don't appear to be blasting us with heat rays, etc.), and that it makes sense to the data and knowledge we already have to come to such a conclusion (greenhouse gases WOULD be expected to increase the temperature, depletion of the ozone layer WOULD be expected to increase solar radiation allowed into our atmosphere, etc.), and suddenly we have a pretty compelling case based on circumstantial evidence.
If we're willing to accept circumstantial evidence as sufficient to get a murder conviction and implement capital punishment, it boggles me why such is not good enough to convince us of anthropological global warming.
Actually, it's a very good analogy. It is intended to show the futility of DRM and copy protections (stopping the railroad) by the media giants who have shoehorned themselves into forced obsolescence (blacksmiths), and point out that perhaps instead of trying to prevent copying, which they cannot do, they should find ways to profit from it any way (railroad tracks are made out of steel, blacksmiths work with steel, instead of making horseshoes, they could make railroad tracks, or even locomotive parts).
And yes, for the record, I think it IS fair to say that hackers working on ways to disseminate data electronically faster and more efficiently are like the people who first put together the railroads: they are radically changing how we think about moving "goods" and conducting business; they also share some similar personality characteristics, such as creativity (to come up with ways to make things happen), intelligence (or do you think any dumbass can perform either task?), and vision (to imagine a way of doing things radically different than the ways that they are done now). DRM crackers may not be the guys laying the tracks or inventing the steam engine, but they ARE the guys designing comfortable passenger cars, figuring out where stations need to go, and showing people how much cheaper and easier it is to travel by train rather than taking a carriage.
Once you start thinking, you can actually separate unrelated ideas from one another, even if they are presented in the same document or by the same person. We not only CAN support Michael Crichton when we says genetic patents are bad while opposing him when he accuses mainstream environmentalists of conspiring to commit mass murder in order to "fake" global warming, but there is NOTHING to stop us from doing so.
Believe it or not, we don't live in a world of dichotomies. Any time you think you only have two choices, you're probably wrong, and you certainly aren't thinking.
I don't remember XP's rollout being this much trouble. I remember being elated at how it just seemed to have drivers for everything I was running and and there was a significant improvement over Win98 and NT (which most of the music software didn't like).
They had gotten a lot of practice by that point with 2000. The 2000 rollout wasn't so pretty, and it took several months before gaming on it was feasible.
It would be, but I love the Pioneer Valley. I've tried to live elsewhere, and I don't feel comfortable with the "normals".
It will take my finding a very special kind of place before I'd be willing to migrate permanently, because it takes a very special kind of place for me to be comfortable with who I am, my beliefs, and my values... all of which are considered to be somewhere between eccentric and twisted everywhere else I've been.
Re:Before anyone says anything about free speech
on
EU Bans Sock-Puppet Blogs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Your view is overly simplistic.
You ignore the fact that corporations are not people, and as such do not (and should not) have the inalienable rights of a human being. You also assume that the right to free speech trumps all other rights (such as life, property, autonomy, etc.), which is completely untrue, not to mention unjust and far more dangerous than limits on free speech.
Try yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and telling the theater staff that you have First Amendment Rights when they remove you from the premises and you'll find out just how little that applies to private persons on private property.
The Right to Free Speech does not, in fact, apply to that speech which is specifically designed to be malicious, it never has, and such an idea flies in the face of it's very origins (see: Immanuel Kant). Trying to apply it to such actually weakens the idea, and perverts the intent of free speech. Fraud, slander, and incitement are all directly opposed to "free", and as such are NOT protected as free speech.
I also wonder why so many people are convinced that specific limits on free speech are a new thing (they aren't), and that such limits make it impossible to protect speech which needs to be free (it hasn't).
What you're forgetting is that WE have blackhats too. The idea isn't to stop the botnet, because we can't do that nearly as fast as 'they" can open up a new one... if we could, botnets wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I think the idea is that if a botnet/virus/whatever is used to "attack the internet" (a notion that I believe to be intentionally broad, much like "attack the country", not necesarily to justify doing whatever we want, but so that we aren't pigeonholed by a narrow definition), then we are going to "attack", with whatever force and technique seems most reasonable (ie. we don't drop bombs on the homes of bank robbers, nor do we send a couple of uniforms armed only with 9mm pistols and handcuffs to arrest government sponsored death squads) the people behind it. If that means back hacking, packet tracing, following convoluted money trails, reverse engineering, traffic analysis, or whatever else we can think of to find the person(s) responsible, then so be it.
Military action might be unlikely if the attacker is, say, a 15 year old kid writing trojans that let him simultaneously crash hundreds of major network hubs as some sort of "practical joke", because once found they would probably just arrest the kid and give him 20 years in federal "pound me in the ass" prison. If, on the other hand, the same thing were done by a team of Chinese black hats for the purpose of undermining our infrastructure in the moments before launching a surprise attack on Taiwan and the US fleet protecting it, a SWAT team is going to be in a little over their heads.
I think you're confused as to what I meant by "I hate Boston". Obviously, it is completely silly to hate the literal, physical city of Boston itself... it is, after all, just a collection of buildings and streets with some people occupying them. I referred more to the socio-political institution of Boston... to the fact that all events in Massachusetts are rated solely on their effect on Boston and/or wealthy Bostonians rather than accepted on their own merits; for instance a couple years ago, several towns in the Northwestern portion of the state suffered massive flooding: roads were lost, homes destroyed, electric and phone service was out for weeks. It took the governor two weeks to so much as fly over the area in a helicopter. Compare this to this summer, when state officials rushed to have a district closer to Boston, where many lawyers and lower level officials who commuted to the city lived, declared a disaster zone and secure Federal assistance despite that the flooding was both far less severe and far less widespread.
Nor is it that I hate the people of Boston, I know many Bostonians, and some of my closest friends are from that area. If a natural disaster warranting dramatic response were to hit Boston, I would absolutely want for it to be resolved as quickly as possible, and for everything to come out okay. Just like I would with Dallas, or New Orleans. Indeed, I think this is one of the biggest flaws in your comment: you equate hating a generalized entity as hating everyone involved. It is absolutely appropriate to hate Al Qaeda, it is not, however, appropriate to hate any particular member of Al Qaeda. I also hate things like capital punishment, poverty and war, but I don't executioners, poor/wealthy people or soldiers. These are not irrational things to hate, nor does hating them cloud my judgement; I simply refuse to weaken my position on them by saying "dislike" or or"oppose" or "have a preference against", those are all true, but none explain why or the degree to which I do.
You are conflating two entirely separate definitions of "hate", which though they share some general characteristics (enough that we can reasonably use one to describe both), are distinctly different. Though if you must justify hate with fear, then I DO fear that Boston will continue to harm the rest of the Commonwealth by abusing its vast political power over the rest of the state (conferred both by being by far the largest population center as well as the capital) at the direct expense of those towns and cities unable to resist both due to their distance (note that Boston is by no means central to the state on Massachusetts), as well as their lack of political power against the immense legislative delegations of Boston and its surrounding towns and cities; as well as that this will directly harm myself, my family, and my community. I feel that such fear is extremely justified by the fact that it has been happening for nearly 300 years. You'd be afraid too.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that we should all avoid sites that require IE, the simple truth is that many of us can't. There are many critical business apps out there that absolutely require IE, and contacting them requesting Firefox support results in a "no, you need IE for security reasons". You'd think it would be enough to just tell them that they're wrong, and that many of the most secure sites in the world are entirely standards compliant and render just fine in any browser, but you'd be wrong. I personally have one such site, and I have witnessed several others. Many MLS services that are required by any real estate agent wishing to do business in this century, for example, require IE to work properly, and the only choices are to suck it up or do business in a different area with a different system.
Believe it or not, there area lot of things that take priority over ideological opposition to "IE reqired" websites, and sometimes there just isn't any choice.
IE Tab is absolutely a must-have.
I agree that it's inappropriate to use in the conext of an unintentional bug, but I can see legitimate uses outside the issue of DRM... for instance, consumer electronics designed to break after about 1 year of regular use (Sony used to do this constantly with the Discman) in order to drive consumers into buying new ones regularly, or Lexmark's (old? haven't used their stuff in ages) practice of selling ink cartridges with very small reservoirs at higher prices in order to subsidize cheap yet very high quality printers.
Point is, "defective by design" describes DRM, but also accurately describes many other shady business practices intended to increase sales through incompatibility and early obsolescence. The fact that it wasn't coined until the advent of DRM doesn't mean we should horde it for that sole use.
Well, I think I found the problem... you live in Denmark. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Denmark or the people that live there; I'm not about bashing Danes. It's just that Google is a US company that focuses on the US first and everywhere else second. You said it yourself, the problem isn't that address searches don't work... it's that they don't work outside the US.
In any case, the core function works just fine. The problem is that Denmark's roads haven't been properly input to their road database. That isn't development's fault, and there's no reason to claim they shouldn't be working on new core functionalities (it's hard to monetize directions, it's easy to monetize business listings; I highly doubt Google isn't going to announce a pay service extending on the new functions... I'm not sure how, I'm not sure when, but I'm sure they will). I hope they fix it, but the sad truth is that your problem isn't going to be at the top of their list because it isn't in their primary market.
Try sending a complaint or something. Maybe they'll put a mook data-entry intern on it.
I'm not seeing how parent is flamebait.
Silly mods and their silly moderation choices.
I don't like Mitt because I have lived under his governorship for the past 6 years.
The man is a snake-oil salesman par none, but that is the beginning and end of what he can do. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to win, and once he does it will be large corporate interests and moving on to his next aspiration all the way.
I don't care what you think of Massachusetts' laws and politics, it is completely inappropriate for the governor of any state to go on cable news networks and overtly lampoon it at every chance, or to virtually abandon the state for 3 years in preparation for a presidential bid. Romney's governorship, for all that he tried to spin it it and save his legacy at the last minute (honest to God, he ran ads during the early days of the gubernatorial election FOR HIMSELF despite the fact that he had already announced his non-candidacy and was supposedly campaigning for his lt. governor), was characterized by incompetence, broken promises, gross media misconduct, and absence.
I admit that I'm unlikely to vote for any Republican candidate (as someone said above, McCain might have been a possibility before he started pandering to the Religious Right; they're poison), because frankly I find the Democrats to be right of my own positions, and the core Republican platform is so far right of me that I can barely understand it. But that said, if there has to be another Republican in the Oval Office, I'd still rather have a half decent one. Romney is the worst candidate out there, and if he gets the Republican nomination it will be nothing short of a tragedy.
Just put him in charge of all the Olympic games or something, he did a great job with the ones in SLC, but other than that, he's an incompetent jackass with a Napoleon complex.
Which is a damn shame, because WW is awesome.
Seriously, how sweet would a properly made WoD MMORPG be? Added bonus: no more lamo LARPs.
... of running the country into the ground with long-debunked pre-Depression economic policies and hypocritical attempts to turn Conservative Christian values into law.
You forgot a few characters.
Anonymous edits aren't the problem: allowing anonymous edits to go through without approval by a named editor (all they would need to do is look quickly and hit an "OK" button or a "Reject" button and it would be enough) is.
I think of it this way, if I don't have a Wikipedia account, and i see a basic grammar/spelling error, I'm not going to take time to open one just to fix it, and I think the community should accept that I would like to help but don't really care to identify myself because doing so might well take longer than simply submitting the edit. If it requires somebody to take vicarious credit by approving the edit, then frankly I won't know the difference, nor do I care, if I did, I'd already have an account.
Then you missed out on a great deal of fun. The best DnD campaigns I've ever played, all the PCs started out as level 2-3, and that only because it's almost impossible to get any experience at all and not hit level two by the second session, and the DM felt it would be better to just get it over with earlier so we could better get into the swing of things without the distraction of leveling.
Personally, I always hate when GMs let the PCs be too powerful. Epic gaming just isn't that fun: I'll take five level three characters struggling through a cave full of kobolds over a level 23 Sorcerer/Monk/Ranger singlehandedly defeating a Dark God with his Vorpal Spatula of Glimmering Destruction +7 any day of the week.
Dell could care less about alternative OSs. In fact, they could care less about primary ones too; the only reason that Dell cares what operating system comes on their machines is because their customers do. Specifically "everyone" (vocal minority aside, they do) wants Windows on both personal and business machines.
The reason that Dell offers blank PCs "intended for Linux" at all has nothing to do with actual customer demand for them: if it did, they wouldn't make them so hard to find on their site. The real reason is that they are a direct threat to Microsoft, and Dell is too big for Microsoft to call their bluff. Essentially, Dell is using "Linux ready" commodity computers as a bargaining chip to get deeper discounts for Windows and Office so that they can get a bigger edge on their competition for the 99% of customers who do, in fact, want them.
If there were serious demand for OSs other than Windows, it would actually hurt Dell, because they would lose one of their biggest advantages. Sure, they could still compete on volume, and they certainly have a great deal of hard capital, but they've sunk a lot of time and money into getting a REALLY juicy Microsoft contract, and if it is suddenly worthless, they're back to squeezing water from stone on hardware.
I probably should, but I'm lazy.
Meh.
D'oh, I forgot to preview.
:heart: righty"
should read "i
Hadn't realized that the open bracket symbol would vanish even in plain old text.
The number one most popular message: "i 3 righty"
Number two: "fsck me tubgirl"
And only did so after carefully weighing it against the cost of a land invasion to both sides. Further, after seeing what *actually* happened to Hiroshima, the second target was changed at the 11th hour from the metropolis of Nagoya to the small city of Nagasaki. The point was to become akin to a force of nature to the Japanese, so that they could honorably surrender without the need for US troops to slaughter every man woman and child first.
I too find it hard to think of a nuclear attack as an act of compassion, but under the circumstances, it was. Thankfully, there is no major culture remaining which requires overwhelming force on the order of a natural disaster as a prerequisite to surrender.
I think you want too much from an analogy.
That said, maybe the media companies should find new ways to make money that do not rely on outdated and obsolete versions of reality. The capital required to move 100,000 copies of Justin Timberlake's new album just isn't what it would have been 50 years ago, and the RIAA needs to not just get over that, but embrace it and find a new profit model. Do I know what that profit model is? No. Is that not my job, but the record industry's? Yes.
As with the analogy, maybe the solution the blacksmiths are looking for is to start producing parts for trains, or to move to a more consumer oriented product line (silverware, puzzles, frying pans, etc.), or to invent ICEs and start building cars (a great piece of turnabout, making the trains obsolete); what the solution ISN'T is to go out every night and wreck the tracks and smash the windows of the railroad company, because it isn't accomplishing anything other than being a nuisance and creating a slight delay of the inevitable.
I admit that I've not been following string theory too closely, has it recently fallen out of favor? Is there some new threshold for acceptable evidence that states we cannot use indirect evidence? Have atoms been discredited because we only have circumstantial evidence that they exist? I don't disagree that global warming has slim to no direct evidence, but I very strongly disagree that this is an important thing to mention. All it means is that we first have to establish certain facts: for example that Earth's temperature is rising (it is, nobody denies this), that this rise clearly coincides with specific human activity (temperatures have gone up at highly accelerated pace since the start of the industrial revolution, evidence gathered from ice cores and glaciers indicates that the current pace is far above any other in the thousands of years of data contained in those ice cores), that no other apparent cause can be given (the Sun hasn't gotten any hotter, aliens don't appear to be blasting us with heat rays, etc.), and that it makes sense to the data and knowledge we already have to come to such a conclusion (greenhouse gases WOULD be expected to increase the temperature, depletion of the ozone layer WOULD be expected to increase solar radiation allowed into our atmosphere, etc.), and suddenly we have a pretty compelling case based on circumstantial evidence.
If we're willing to accept circumstantial evidence as sufficient to get a murder conviction and implement capital punishment, it boggles me why such is not good enough to convince us of anthropological global warming.
Actually, it's a very good analogy. It is intended to show the futility of DRM and copy protections (stopping the railroad) by the media giants who have shoehorned themselves into forced obsolescence (blacksmiths), and point out that perhaps instead of trying to prevent copying, which they cannot do, they should find ways to profit from it any way (railroad tracks are made out of steel, blacksmiths work with steel, instead of making horseshoes, they could make railroad tracks, or even locomotive parts).
And yes, for the record, I think it IS fair to say that hackers working on ways to disseminate data electronically faster and more efficiently are like the people who first put together the railroads: they are radically changing how we think about moving "goods" and conducting business; they also share some similar personality characteristics, such as creativity (to come up with ways to make things happen), intelligence (or do you think any dumbass can perform either task?), and vision (to imagine a way of doing things radically different than the ways that they are done now). DRM crackers may not be the guys laying the tracks or inventing the steam engine, but they ARE the guys designing comfortable passenger cars, figuring out where stations need to go, and showing people how much cheaper and easier it is to travel by train rather than taking a carriage.
Oh, but you can! All it requires is thinking.
Once you start thinking, you can actually separate unrelated ideas from one another, even if they are presented in the same document or by the same person. We not only CAN support Michael Crichton when we says genetic patents are bad while opposing him when he accuses mainstream environmentalists of conspiring to commit mass murder in order to "fake" global warming, but there is NOTHING to stop us from doing so.
Believe it or not, we don't live in a world of dichotomies. Any time you think you only have two choices, you're probably wrong, and you certainly aren't thinking.
The category of having scientific beliefs in direct contradiction to the mainstream?
Yeah, I'd say that creationists and anti-global warmingists(?) both fall into that same category.
What part of that proved any, let alone "your" point?
They had gotten a lot of practice by that point with 2000. The 2000 rollout wasn't so pretty, and it took several months before gaming on it was feasible.
It would be, but I love the Pioneer Valley. I've tried to live elsewhere, and I don't feel comfortable with the "normals".
It will take my finding a very special kind of place before I'd be willing to migrate permanently, because it takes a very special kind of place for me to be comfortable with who I am, my beliefs, and my values... all of which are considered to be somewhere between eccentric and twisted everywhere else I've been.
Your view is overly simplistic.
You ignore the fact that corporations are not people, and as such do not (and should not) have the inalienable rights of a human being. You also assume that the right to free speech trumps all other rights (such as life, property, autonomy, etc.), which is completely untrue, not to mention unjust and far more dangerous than limits on free speech.
Try yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and telling the theater staff that you have First Amendment Rights when they remove you from the premises and you'll find out just how little that applies to private persons on private property.
The Right to Free Speech does not, in fact, apply to that speech which is specifically designed to be malicious, it never has, and such an idea flies in the face of it's very origins (see: Immanuel Kant). Trying to apply it to such actually weakens the idea, and perverts the intent of free speech. Fraud, slander, and incitement are all directly opposed to "free", and as such are NOT protected as free speech.
I also wonder why so many people are convinced that specific limits on free speech are a new thing (they aren't), and that such limits make it impossible to protect speech which needs to be free (it hasn't).
What you're forgetting is that WE have blackhats too. The idea isn't to stop the botnet, because we can't do that nearly as fast as 'they" can open up a new one... if we could, botnets wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I think the idea is that if a botnet/virus/whatever is used to "attack the internet" (a notion that I believe to be intentionally broad, much like "attack the country", not necesarily to justify doing whatever we want, but so that we aren't pigeonholed by a narrow definition), then we are going to "attack", with whatever force and technique seems most reasonable (ie. we don't drop bombs on the homes of bank robbers, nor do we send a couple of uniforms armed only with 9mm pistols and handcuffs to arrest government sponsored death squads) the people behind it. If that means back hacking, packet tracing, following convoluted money trails, reverse engineering, traffic analysis, or whatever else we can think of to find the person(s) responsible, then so be it.
Military action might be unlikely if the attacker is, say, a 15 year old kid writing trojans that let him simultaneously crash hundreds of major network hubs as some sort of "practical joke", because once found they would probably just arrest the kid and give him 20 years in federal "pound me in the ass" prison. If, on the other hand, the same thing were done by a team of Chinese black hats for the purpose of undermining our infrastructure in the moments before launching a surprise attack on Taiwan and the US fleet protecting it, a SWAT team is going to be in a little over their heads.
Much as it sucks getting modded down, it WAS off-topic. I'd do the same thing, but I don't fear negative karma.
I think you're confused as to what I meant by "I hate Boston". Obviously, it is completely silly to hate the literal, physical city of Boston itself... it is, after all, just a collection of buildings and streets with some people occupying them. I referred more to the socio-political institution of Boston... to the fact that all events in Massachusetts are rated solely on their effect on Boston and/or wealthy Bostonians rather than accepted on their own merits; for instance a couple years ago, several towns in the Northwestern portion of the state suffered massive flooding: roads were lost, homes destroyed, electric and phone service was out for weeks. It took the governor two weeks to so much as fly over the area in a helicopter. Compare this to this summer, when state officials rushed to have a district closer to Boston, where many lawyers and lower level officials who commuted to the city lived, declared a disaster zone and secure Federal assistance despite that the flooding was both far less severe and far less widespread. Nor is it that I hate the people of Boston, I know many Bostonians, and some of my closest friends are from that area. If a natural disaster warranting dramatic response were to hit Boston, I would absolutely want for it to be resolved as quickly as possible, and for everything to come out okay. Just like I would with Dallas, or New Orleans. Indeed, I think this is one of the biggest flaws in your comment: you equate hating a generalized entity as hating everyone involved. It is absolutely appropriate to hate Al Qaeda, it is not, however, appropriate to hate any particular member of Al Qaeda. I also hate things like capital punishment, poverty and war, but I don't executioners, poor/wealthy people or soldiers. These are not irrational things to hate, nor does hating them cloud my judgement; I simply refuse to weaken my position on them by saying "dislike" or or"oppose" or "have a preference against", those are all true, but none explain why or the degree to which I do. You are conflating two entirely separate definitions of "hate", which though they share some general characteristics (enough that we can reasonably use one to describe both), are distinctly different. Though if you must justify hate with fear, then I DO fear that Boston will continue to harm the rest of the Commonwealth by abusing its vast political power over the rest of the state (conferred both by being by far the largest population center as well as the capital) at the direct expense of those towns and cities unable to resist both due to their distance (note that Boston is by no means central to the state on Massachusetts), as well as their lack of political power against the immense legislative delegations of Boston and its surrounding towns and cities; as well as that this will directly harm myself, my family, and my community. I feel that such fear is extremely justified by the fact that it has been happening for nearly 300 years. You'd be afraid too.